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I’m a news junkie. But I am completely clueless about one policy issue that is hugely important (it affects what we eat and how much we pay for it), involves hundreds of billions of dollars in government programs and subsidies, and was splashed all over the front pages last week as the latest example of congressional dysfunction.

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Although the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the mega-agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill, has only been in existence for about six months, all of the Republican presidential candidates and GOP congressional leaders have slammed the agency and called for its abolition. Their central charge is that the regulations it has already promulgated are strangling the financial system and disabling banks from making the kinds of loans to small businesses and potential homeowners that would reignite the economy.

Author Profile

Steven Brill’s book – “America’s Bitter Pill: Politics, Money, Backroom Deals, and the Fight To Fix Our Broken Healthcare System” – was published last month by Random House. He has written for magazines including New York, The New Yorker, Time, Harpers and The New York Times Magazine. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, 10 regional legal newspapers and Brill's Content Magazine. He also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative.